Journal/Essay Re: Roll your own epiphany. An excuse for (long) thoughts on ritual and cliché
The Steller’s jays have Thoughts this morning, and they’re not afraid to share them. (Like in Billy Collins’s “No Things”—they’re “banging away on the mystery/…and to hell with the neighbors.”) I was up early anyway, because? Sometimes there is no reason. The sunrise colors were delicate and lovely, and now we wait for another hour until the sun itself is high enough to reach over the mountain and the pines.
I’m writing that description wryly. I read Angry Bunny Man’s post yesterday about the tropes of journal-type post-writing and cracked up, in part because I recognized myself.
Opening paragraph—looking out the window. Check.
(Ah. One-sentence paragraph. Check.)
(Animal reference? I’m not sure the jays count.)
But I also got to thinking about the difference between cliche and ritual, because I’ve been reading Confucius lately—no, reading about Confucius—on how ritual, conscious or unconscious, can be a shaping force.
(Half-understood philosopher, taken out of context. Italics. Check, check.)
Take the opening paragraph—looking out the window. When I’m writing a journal entry, I need the physical grounding before I dive into who knows what web of associations. It’s “something everyone does,” but it’s also a ritual that shapes my capacity to think and write. It serves a purpose, and I will continue to do it. In a formal essay, I’d cut it as irrelevant, but in a web-LOG, I’ll leave it, as it does, in fact, log the beginning of my thought process.
What would make it cliche? Hmm. I know what would make it empty: If I were doing it because I thought I had to, or to look like someone wiser or more important than I am, or because I’d seen someone else do it. A ritual undertaken thoughtlessly.
Cliche, I would say, is more a reader issue. What I write is not cliche to me, or I wouldn’t write it. But it might be to a reader, who’s seen it all before. If the reader blames the writer for being predictable—when the reader could just not click on posts titled “Journal” or “today’s date”—the reader apparently does not want to take the consequences for their own decisions and would rather shuffle that responsibility onto someone else. (One of my friends was walking her infant in Central Park. The infant said, “Coo!” A passer-by said, “How cliche.” Not the baby’s problem, I’m thinking.)
(Italics. Check.)
Quoting half-understood philosophers out of context? Absolutely. The thing is, they are out of context, sometimes by a hemisphere and a few millennia. Whole pantheons and foundational epistemologies. I will never quote Weil on attention well, because I have neither interest nor capacity nor the heart to embed myself in abusive labor conditions like she did so that I can truly stand in solidarity with laborers.
And yet I can respond to something in her work, as I can to something in the Stoics, in Classical Chinese philosophy, absurdism, Emerson, Quaker thought, and “wisdom literature.” Mastery is not a pre-requisite for thinking; thinking is a process. One of the gifts writing gives us is the chance to try ideas on for size, and to transplant them messily from their out-of-reach original contexts, where they were part of a whole body of thought embedded in a particular culture, into lives where they don’t really…fit. Journals are the ritual form we have for such thinking. I fully intend to continue to journal.
To paraphrase Antonio Damasio, consciousness is the feeling of what happens when an organism encounters something in the world and is changed by it. Emotions signal changes in internal regulatory/homeostatic balance. I would extend that: repeated patterns of behavior are often ways we shape emotions and regulate our internal balance.
So mastering the philosophical canon is maybe not the point. Complete accuracy and total understanding aren’t the point. The ritualized response of calling to mind something that has moved you toward more viability is, because it repeats and reinforces that movement.
On the other hand, I will likely never write about the “villain” and “solution,” because I distrust binary thinking and suspect it leads to fundamentalism (a mentality which extends beyond religion). Some find it a path toward safety, stability, viability, cultural homeostasis; I find it buries too much truth. So the ritual attitudes I enact in my own writing tend to be indecisive, flexible, and provisional. They are totally caricaturable for the reader (italics: check) but they re-enforce and shape my understanding of how to live in the world. I will continue to write that way.
I will probably never say “We should…” as it sounds to me like preaching, which strikes me as a form of coercion. To me preaching is a ritual enactment of power; I prefer ritual enactments of presentation that make room for others’ intellectual autonomy. My approach probably diminishes the “impact” of my writing, but I don’t want to shape or be shaped to “should.”
I look at the blogging world, and confess that after a while, yes, most of it becomes cliche to me. Or—I could see those same posts as rituals enacted to shape the writers’ sense of order or balance in the world, or to help them keep fight-or-flight where they know how to deal with it. Their words might enact deep interest in everything; learned helplessness; learned strength; the anchoring power of common sense; disdainful superiority; dystopian fear; a hopeful belief in improvement. Those can all be tools of homeostasis, broadly understood.
Angry Bunny Man’s role of Jester is a ritual one, too—a time-honored one that pokes holes in pretentiousness and keeps people honest, and that helps people (including the jester, in this case) remember to laugh at themselves. Without that intent, it’s cliche—the ironic stance that can’t abide earnestness.
Confucius (if I understand him rightly) emphasized intent—especially the mentality of kindness and humility—as a shaping force, the thing that inhabits the repeated forms of ritual and allows us in turn to be shaped well by them. It is hard to know anyone else’s intent. But words and actions can show us the rituals, conscious or unconscious, being given shape.